Fun and lesser-known facts about startups
🌟 1. Post-it Pivot
Pinterest began with its co-founder pinning ideas on his bedroom wall. That physical “pinboard” idea turned into a billion-dollar visual discovery platform.
🚀 2. Billion-Dollar Side Hustle
Slack was born from a failed video game company. They shut the game down but turned their internal team chat tool into one of the world’s most popular work apps.
🍕 3. Pizza-Funded Google
In the early days, Google’s first servers were partly funded by pizza orders from friends who wanted to help Larry Page and Sergey Brin stay up coding all night!
📱 4. Airbnb’s Cereal Story
Airbnb’s founders once sold collectible election-themed cereal boxes called “Obama O’s” and “Cap’n McCain’s” to pay off credit card debt and keep the company alive. It worked — and they got $30,000 from selling cereal!
😲 5. Angry Birds Was Rovio’s 52nd Game
Before creating Angry Birds, Rovio made 51 games that never took off. It took years of trial and error for them to find the one idea that made them a household name.
💼 6. No Garage? No Problem!
While many startups love the “garage myth,” not all began there. Shopify, for example, started because the founders wanted to sell snowboards online but couldn’t find good e-commerce software. So, they built their own.
🌎 7. WhatsApp’s Humble Start
WhatsApp’s co-founder, Jan Koum, signed the $19 billion acquisition deal with Facebook on the door of the welfare office where he used to collect food stamps.
🔄 8. Instagram’s Pivot
Instagram started as a location-based check-in app called Burbn. The founders noticed people loved sharing photos more than checking in — so they pivoted and focused only on photos.
📈 9. Netflix’s Original Business
Netflix started by mailing DVDs in red envelopes. They pivoted to streaming after seeing the power of broadband — and now they produce award-winning shows and movies!
🧃 10. The Name Game
Many big startup names are happy accidents: Google was a misspelling of ‘googol’, Spotify was made up on the spot, and Yahoo! originally stood for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".
